Did you have a 9 to 5 before all of this? What’d you do? Why’d you quit?I worked stock at Banana Republic [womens] when I was 19 for about five months, I hated it. I promised myself I would never work retail again so I reevaluated my goals, got my mind right, and stepped my hustle up.

How did your Tumblr start? What inspired you to do it?It started off as just for fun. At the time everyone was either faking the funk as fake professional photographers on Flickr or re-blogging pictures of high end clothing on Tumblr, I chose Tumblr [as a platform]. I gave it my twist though— like every normal guy, my phone is filled with nude pictures received from beautiful women. I gathered the best ones and started dropping them daily. The feedback was filled with love and amazement. I added a contribution email beneath my headline for submissions and before I knew I hit close to 7 million page views in a year from 210 countries worldwide.

Friday, July 6, 2012

Take a few minutes and read the whole interview. I promise if you're in business for yourself, juggle creative projects, or whatever, you'll be happy you did so.

AVC: How can you not be in a perpetual state of complete exhaustion?

LCK: You know what? That’s the central question of my life—how to manage all of that. There’s a woman I see who’s not my therapist, but she’s like an old friend who’s a therapist in profession. She lets me talk to her like a therapist once in a while, and she does a great thing. Whenever I have a big dilemma, like this is a big problem in my life, she always says, “Wow, you’re going to have to figure that out.” [Laughs.] That’s all she says. And so I had to figure it out. I had to put some time and effort into figuring out how to manage energy and time and brain effort and all that stuff. I’ve got a bunch of different things I do. I learned that sharks sleep parts of their brain, like rolling blackouts; they can’t fall asleep because they can’t stop moving or they’ll suffocate. So they sleep sections of their brain at a time. So I do kind of a version of that, where I shut down brain centers. I literally tell myself, “Don’t logistically problem-solve for the next three hours, but you can talk to folks. Driving my kid home from school—don’t think about all the professional things you have to do.”

AVC: How can you do all this without also cracking from pressure?

LCK: I like pressure. Pressure doesn’t make me crack. It’s enabling. I eat pressure, and there might be times when I get a bad feeling in my gut that this might be too much, but you feel pressure when you’re not doing something, you know? When you’re getting ready for something, you feel pressure—when you’re anticipating. But when you’re constantly in activity, there’s no time for pressure to just sit there and make you crack.